March 4, 2019

Tactica 2019
Pictures (2)

Part two of the pictures I made at this years Tactica in Hamburg. Sorry for the delay but I had much to do and did not find a quiet moment to upload the pictures in the last weeks, in the next weeks there will be more time for postings.
The first set of Tactica 2019 pictures can be found in this post.

Many pictures were bad, maybe I will upload them in a separate gallery, but here are some of the nicer pictures I made. There is no special order in the pictures, but between them you will find some some lines about some things that I wanted to mention.

The guys from the Ad Arma tabletop club in Haßloch had a very nice demotable for WW2 Kampfzone, a tabletop game in 1:35 scale. We had a small talk with them, they were nice guys who made their own game, which took some years to finish.
Too bad that most pictures of the table were not sharp enough to see details.

PB12 is a generic system for tabletop games. With this you can play battles between all thinkable forces, how about Romans versus Tyranids, it would be possible with PB12. You will find all infos, the ruleset, units and much more on their homepage.
I will definitely check this out in the future.

A classic from my childhood now in 28mm, just like last year the guys from the Tabletop Kiosk had a very nice "Masters Of The Universe" themed table. The Castle Grayskull scenery piece was very impressive. Many of the miniatures used for this are heavily modified, you can find some before/after pictures in their blog.
They played a modified version of the Bolt Action ruleset.

There were (at least) two great Star Wars Legion tables. I liked the fact, that these guys used electronics to improve their scenery parts. On a defence turret was a motor built in, that thing made the turret rotating, and some buildings were lighted. Also very fascinating were some minis with LEDs built in, for example the Darth Vader mini which can be found in this post.

And then there were the people from the Star Wars Dinner Hamburg, a Star Wars reenactment group, see some of them on the first and the last picture of this post.

I had the chance to watch a game of Gaslands for some minutes because this game is on my watchlist since it was published. I like the idea of cars battling each other in a post apocalyptic world. Maybe I will organise a session when I have the ruleset.
I like the idea that only the rules and templates are needed, you will have to build your own car from an 1:64 Hot Wheels or Matchbox car for this game.

That is all for this years Tactica. Since I have much more time in the next weeks than in the weeks before, in the next days I will continue the closer looks at some "TANKS The Modern Age" expansions, a first post is almost finished, and I built an M163 and an M901 from one box, resulting in a future post about bitsrecycling without the 3D printer.

February 20, 2019

Marder Tank Expansion
for
TANKS The Modern Age

A closer look at the Marder tank expansion for "TANKS The Modern Age" from Galeforce 9. This expansion, which my mate Olli got for his Bundeswehr troops, offers one plastic Marder kit and some crew and equipment cards for the game.
The Marder kit is the same kit which you can buy for "Team Yankee" from Battlefront Models.

The kit included made a good impression when I had it in my hands, no visible ejectormarks or sinkholes, almost no flash and minimal mouldlines. But take a look for yourself:

As you can see, it is a nicely casted kit. But the interesting part are the cards of this expansion, so let us see which cards were included:

First there is the card for the Marder itself, which has a high Initiative of 8 but has no armour and only 3 hitpoints. His rapid fire ability with 5 dice is only effective against other unarmoured vehicles and tanks, but with Milan missiles it has a 4 dice attack against all units from the game. Equipped with a Milan launcher this thing is a nice addition to your Bundeswehr troops for only 13 points. 
 
Beside the unitcard you find 3 crew and 2 equipmentcards in the box. There is only one card which can be used for all nations, the rest of them can only be used by the German Forces.

The heroic German crewmember, Carl Hauff, offers beside the initiative boost the feature that his tank could move after an unsuccessful attack, and this happens more often than you may think.

The only for Marders usable Milan rocket gives the Marder some extra punch, his standard attack of 2 is pretty worthless, and the rapid fire ability does not work on armoured vehicles.

"Duck Hunter", usable for all nations, is a nice addition, it gives the vehicle which carries this upgrade some antiair abilities.

The two remaining cards "Lone Wolf" and the "Platoon Coordinator" are also some nice additions, but they will show if they are worth their costs, I think I will see them when Olli has his Bundeswehr battlegroup finished. 

All in all a nice addition to the German forces, I am looking forward to play a first game against the Marder and the rest of his comrades, then we will see its strenghts and weaknesses.
Tomorrow I will upload the next batch of pictures from this years Tactica, in the following posts after that I will take some closer looks at more "TANKS The Modern Age" expansions.